The Gundelfinger House

Few know the story of the gray apartment building on the southwest corner of Broadway and Elm. It begins with Daniel Gundelfinger, son of Bavarian immigrants and well-known High Street hardware merchant. He built it as his home in 1892, three years before the Herman Tanner residence on the south end of that block was built. The newspaper said the two houses were “very elegant,” noting that they bookended what was becoming “one of the [city’s] most impressive residential blocks.” The spacious, two-story brick Gundelfinger home had a deeply recessed, arched entrance on Broadway; prominent stone lintels; ornate, dentiled cornices; mansard roof with decorative metal parapet and a hexagonal turret; and two huge metal urns flanking the entrance that identified it as a hardware merchant’s home.


Left: Gundelfinger House ca. 1920 (Schroeder family collection); right: Gundelfinger Building, 2018 (courtesy Matthew Holland).

All the other houses in the 600 block postdate the Gundelfinger house and are now on the National Register of Historic Places, but the Gundelfinger house is not. Daniel built the house for his wife, the Bavarian-born Margaretha Hoehler (age 17 when married), and the happy couple moved in. But she became seriously ill, and in a few months, in 1893, she died. Her funeral was held in the parlor of the new house.

Daniel then married Bertha (Bessie) Roesen in 1895, and family life resumed in the big house; they had two sons in short time, Daniel W. and Karl H. But tragedy struck again: in July 1906 a probate jury declared Daniel of “unsound mind and incompetent of conducting his affairs.” He was committed to the State Hospital in Fulton and died there in November 1907. What would become of Daniel’s dream house?

The Roesen family was intermarried with the Moerschels, who had the big Capitol Brewery. Brewery owner Jacob Moerschel lived in the Gundelfinger house while he was building his Villa Panorama mansion on Swifts Highway in 1907–1908. A much smaller home was built on the property, 602 Broadway, for Bertha and sons. (Now it’s a driveway.) In 1916 the “Bertha Gundelfinger property” (two houses at 600 and 602 Broadway) was sold for $2,500 to neighbor Nelson C. Burch. The widow moved to rural Columbia to live with her son Karl, who, incidentally, committed suicide at age 44.

Between 1931 and 1935 the Gundelfinger house was transformed from a spacious single-family residence into four apartments. The Broadway entrance was eliminated, and a new, pointed-arch, canopied entrance was opened facing Elm Street to access the two apartments on each floor. The lintels were removed and all windows made smaller, changing its appearance from Victorian to Craftsman. The mansard roof, dentiled cornice (minus parapet), and turret were retained. Also, a two-story addition was fused to the back of the house, with a matching pointed-arch, canopied entrance for the two new apartments.

Today, the six-apartment Gundelfinger Building looks as if it has been this way all along, but its history is betrayed by the roofline—the addition lacks a mansard roof. The building’s address was changed from 600 Broadway to 301 and 301½ W. Elm. The original brick exterior was faced with tan stucco, mirroring the tan stucco just added to the catty-corner brick German Methodist Church building that had also been converted into apartments. The Gundelfinger’s stucco has since been painted gray.



Since the 1930s the apartments have served as rental residences of Missouri state office professionals, including an assistant attorney general, lawyers at the Supreme Court, state representatives, and professionals with the Tax and Public Service commissions, State Auditor, Education and Revenue departments, Board of Health, and Missouri Highway Patrol.

The 126-year-old building is now owned by Matt Holland and Eric Hemeyer (H&H Property Management), who are renovating it inside and out to make it once again a sought-after residence in Munichburg, Jefferson City’s historic Southside.

©Walter A. Schroeder, 2018

This piece originally ran in the Jefferson City News Tribune as an ad for Oktoberfest on September 23, 2018.

The Brewery and Ice House

When I was growing up in the 1940s, the biggest building in Jefferson City’s Southside was the brewery, where the Moerschel family made Capitol Beer. At the time, it was the only brewery in Jefferson City.




It was actually a group of buildings on the east side of Washington, extending from Dunklin back to the alley (now Cedar Way). The alley is about ten feet lower than the bordering streets. The brewery was just around the corner of Washington from our house on Elm Street. On the Washington Street side of the brewery were two deep wells, dug before Jefferson City had a public water supply. Jefferson City beer was made with well water from limestone rocks, not Missouri River water! Mom said that when she was a girl around 1915, when homes had no cold water, she would go to those wells, which always had water flowing out of the top of them, and get a drink of cold well water on hot summer days.

Since, as a kid, I had nothing to do with beer, the brewery itself meant little to me, except for the powerful smell on days when hops and other grains were being cooked. You could smell it all over the Southside. The four-story brew house faced on the alley, which we called “the brewery alley.” The alley was the route I took to get to important places for boys like the Southside Drug Store and Central Dairy. The loading platforms were there too, with trucks coming and going, so I was able to watch a lot of action when I passed by.

Much more important to all of us kids was the brewery’s ice house that sat right on the Dunklin Street brick sidewalk. Also owned by the Moerschels, the ice house provided the whole city with ice. They ice house also had stalls where local grocery wholesalers could keep quantities of meat and fresh produce in storage. People who had ice boxes instead of refrigerators for keeping food cool had square-foot signs that they put in their front windows to signal the deliveryman in the street how much ice to leave on delivery day. The sign had four large numbers—25, 50, 75, 100—along each of the four sides of the square, and the family rotated it so that the number for the size of ice block to be delivered would be at the top of the sign and visible from the street. Some families on Elm Street had ice delivered for their ice boxes, and when the ice truck stopped on our street on hot summer days, it was a signal for all the kids to come out from wherever they were and get pieces of ice from the truck. The young deliveryman sometimes chipped off some ice if there weren’t enough chips already in the truck bed to go around.

Whenever we passed the ice house on hot days we looked for pieces of ice. Mr. Frank Wehmeyer sat out on the loading platform next to the brick sidewalk and joked with all the kids who passed by. Crushed ice was packed in two-layer paper bags, and you could put a quarter in a slot, push a button, and a big bag came rumbling down a hidden chute, then popped out through a window with rubber flaps onto the loading platform. You had your choice when making homemade ice cream: you could get crushed ice in the bag or you could buy a block, take it home, and chip it yourself with an ice pick. Chipped ice, which was thinner, packed better around the ice cream canister than crushed ice, which tended to be chunky. But it was less work to buy the crushed ice. If we got a block of ice, we put it in a burlap sack and two persons carried it home, each holding an end of the burlap sack. Otherwise we used my red wagon. Homemade ice cream was delicious! Folks all over the Southside made homemade ice cream using ice house ice.

The Moerschel Brewery, which began in 1892 (but it continued brewery operations on that site that began before the Civil War), ceased operation in 1947. That was sad for the Southside. The ice house stayed open longer, until 1972, when all the brewery and associated buildings were demolished. The deep wells were capped, and thousands of old bricks (some building walls were seven bricks thick!) and 20,000 cubic yards of dirt were used to bring the site up to Dunklin Street level. A new chain Safeway grocery store was built on the site. It is now a warehouse and parking lot for Prairie Farms (Central Dairy).

Copyright 2011 by Walter A. Schroeder.

--------------------------

Read more about it! Breweries and Saloons in Jefferson City, Missouri, by Walter A. Schroeder, is now available from the Old Munichburg Association for $8 a copy. It’s full of information about Jeff City’s beer history: breweries, tap rooms, beer gardens, and the German immigrant culture that nurtured them.